Think about this. You have your customer brand, which is how your consumers and how your partners feel about your brand. Then you have your talent brand, which is how your employees and prospective new hires think about you as a place to work. Then you have your corporate brand, which involves how your key stakeholders like influencers, investors, government orgs perceive your organization.

If you lay over all of those three, the overlapping area, the core, the heart of it is your brand DNA. It's the reason why you exist, it's what sets you apart. Focus on that. Especially in a conversation like sustainability, which has both rational and emotional overtones, you want to be able to communicate this consistently through a blended content journey that reaches all three of these core audiences.

George B. Thomas: So, yeah, all three. And so first of all, let's just back up 50,000 feet and ask the question, Do you know your brand DNA? Um, if you don't and you haven't kind of paid attention to these things, one of the things I'd love to do on this live show in moving forward and on the podcast is give you actionable items.

Building a brand DNA, understanding the intersection or overlapping of the things of your customer brand. How does the consumer feel, talent, brand, your employees, and future talent, and that corporate brand level that Purna talked about to try to figure out your brand DNA is the next step. And listen, if you wanna dive deeper into that segment and what Purna unlocks or unpacks there, again head over to the Marketing Smarts Podcast link in the description below.

As Purna was talking about this brand DNA, though, my mind started to think about the word trust and building trust. And I have to ask, how often in your daily work do you think about or talk with your coworkers about how do we build trust with our customers? And trust comes in a couple different things, right?

It comes in things actually being the way that they should. It comes in special areas where you kind of delight. It comes in that, that's, um, Major success in communication. So there's a couple lanes that your brain can go on when you start to think about this building trust, and we'll get back to that trust conversation with Purna in a few seconds.

Related Articles From MarketingProfs

But I mentioned delight, communication, and honestly that's a great segue for the next section in today's episode, which is the marketing profs blog. That's right. We're digging in and this is where we curate information. We look at the treasure trove of valuable information and pull out two pieces.

Maybe sometimes three. Like if I can find three, I'm gonna give it to you. But for today, two pieces of gold to help you be a better B2B marketer. And since we're talking about brand and trust in today's show, two words again kind of come to mind. And that's delight and nurture or communicate. And actually, with nurturing, it could be communication and other things.

But the first thing that I wanna look at, the first article is actually how to spark customer delight. And so how to spark customer delight by Jamie Gier. And this is fun. We've all heard of things like, oh man, there was this amazing 404 page. Or did you see their Contact Us page? And this article is exactly what will help you kind of find those hidden places where you can, or unexpected places where you can show or give delight to the customer.

So in this article Jamie talks about the 404. The About Page landing pages, social media, newsletters, infographics, there's a bunch of stuff. And what's fun is you can read it or, check this out, because on the MarketingProfs page you can listen to the article as well. So if you wanna sip your coffee, sip your tea, sip whatever beverages that you wanna sip, and you want to actually listen to the article, you can now—again, the easiest way to get to these articles and into more information.

Let's go ahead and talk about the second article for today. And that is three ways to never stop dating your customer, three ways to nurture relationships. Now, this one to me is really, really interesting because we talk about never stop communicating.

This is so true. When I think about marketing automation and the B2B space, this could be process automation, but more importantly, especially if we're tying it into communication, it literally could be this lead nurturing or customer delighting. Communication, you know, through automated emails in a sequence over a certain amount of time. But really what's interesting, and I've seen this over the past 60, 90 days, some of the conversations that I've been having with other marketers is this idea of text or texting or SMS, and I cannot tell you the amount of marketers I've seen do some type of integration to whatever CRM platform they're using to be able to communicate via text.

As the article here says, posting 95% open rate you know, texting might make sense for you. And your business. But the idea here is dive into both of those articles. Never stop dating your customers: three ways to nurture relationships, and how to spark customer delight in unexpected places.

Both of those hopefully will trigger some ideas for you on how you can start to build trust, right? How you can actually leak in some of your brand awesomeness into these areas, into these things. Whether it be communication automation, whether it be on certain pages, but kind of holistic look of, Hey, we've got a—and I'm kind of making this up on the fly, right?—we've got a trust strategy.

Do you have a trust strategy for your business? I might have to write something about that to be honest with you.

The Trust Triangle

But here's the thing: Purna kept digging in deeper into this kind of conversation around trust, around brand. And she said these words, and I'll tell you as a nerdy marketer, my ears perked up and she said these words: trust triangle.

I was like, This needs to be pulled out of the podcast. People need to hear about this, how to build a trust plan, how to have a trust triangle, and so let's go ahead and watch that right now.

Purna Virji: Some incredibly brilliant researchers had broken down that there are three core elements of trust when it comes to audiences and organizations. It really falls down into three areas, which are authenticity, empathy, and logic. If you can shine in these three core areas, that's how you can really connect and allow people to get to your core brand DNA.

It's so important. I can't stress this enough. We can't be siloed anymore. Marketers, HR people, your consumers, your prospective hires, it's all merging. We all want to work for the company whose products we really love and like, and we know that they're a good and trusted company to work for. These are the brands that do well….

What it comes down to is to go beyond corporate jargon, go beyond the expected post, and show the heart of who you are as a brand and talk about why you exist. Peel back the layers, because if you don't do it on your own, consumers are going to do this for you.

Time and again, we're seeing companies digging deeper. You can say, "I believe in diversity and inclusion," or, "I believe in sustainable manufacturing practices." People are going to go and check out your board. Are you really diverse? People are going to go and dive into some of your manufacturing practices. We are no longer just willing to accept things at face value. People care. There is such a genuine increase in what people are concerned about. It just takes a couple of clicks to get to the heart.

When you're talking about things, there is so much content that you are competing with every single day. What do they say? You're scrolling 300 feet a day just on your phone alone. What's going to stand out? Certainly not the corporate jargon or the sea of sameness that everyone else is talking about because it's the safe thing to do.

George B. Thomas: The sea of sameness. Oh my gosh. I was like, Yes, yes, please, let's battle against that.

And then, 300 feet a day scrolling. Mind blown. That is crazy. But yeah, my thumb probably agrees with that. More importantly though was the trust triangle, and whether you're creating a video, whether you're creating a blog, article, whatever content you're creating, actually, whatever conversation you're having.

I would almost suggest, are you asking yourself these things? Is it authentic? Is it empathetic? And is it logical? Because those are the three things that built the trust triangle, authentic, empathetic, and logical.

And I love that Purna mentioned these are not just buzzwords, like this is not just lip service, but these are the things that you can pull out the tools and use to battle against that sea of sameness that she mentions.

This Week From the Community

Oh my gosh. You know, who's not in the sea of sameness? That's the MP B2B community, y'all. And we like to search far and wide in that hashtag, in that universe if you will, to find amazing information and conversations to bring to the masses. So first, make sure you're using that hashtag moving forward. Hashtag mpb2b.

Second, make sure you have fun and add value to the community. And then at some point we'll probably spotlight you or your crew on the show.

Now, this week's From the Community is from Twitter, and it's from our good friend Ann Handley. Yes. It's kind of cheating, but it made sense as soon as I saw it and I know you're thinking, George, come on, come on. Hey, trust me, this is important and you're gonna wanna know about it.

There's two reasons why it actually made it into the show today:

1. There's a dope video attached; link in the description below. These people are people, you know, it's a song, you know, it's very creative. I laughed my butt off. I laughed several times watching this video, so that's one reason why I was in there.
2. And then events are back, baby. Can I get an amen in the chat pane or a thumbs up in the chat pane if you're excited to get back to an event, to go do an event. And so make sure you check out the B2B Forum this October, and that's exactly what this tweet was about.

Concluding Words of Wisdom

Now here's the thing: Purna—the whole interview was super amazing. One of the things that I like to do, and one of the ways that will end most of these Marketing Smarts Live Shows, is with some words of wisdom because words of wisdom are worth gold. It's literally the words out of somebody's mind that has traveled a path before us or knows things that we don't know.

And one of the things that, you know, I always try to do in life is learn from those around me. If you're a Trekkie (I don't know if I have any Trekkies in the room), it's a little bit of like stealing out of that borg mentality: Surround myself with these types of people and try to learn as much from their brains as humanly possible because the brain power of many is definitely stronger than the brain power of one.

At the end of the marketing sports podcast, I asked Purna what words of wisdom she would share with the B2B marketers of the world. And here's what she had to say.

Purna Virji: So often we'll hear from content marketers around the world that there's only so many hours in a day, there's only limited resources, we're exhausted, how do we consistently come up with content to be always on. I want to please reassure you that you can reuse, you can recycle, you can build your own sustainable content strategy. Sustainable for you, not to do with the climate.

Reshare. If something was done really well in the past, remix it into a different format and share it, or reshare the exact same thing a few months later, maybe with something updated. Edelman Trust Barometer Report, they come out once a year, it's super successful. They don't do it 10 times a year because it is successful.

Do your research, understand what your audience wants. Create something once that will be great, reshare it, remix it. Curate versus create all the time. There are a lot of ways that you can remix and reuse to not be working all the time but have your content be working all the time.

George B. Thomas: That's right. Your content working all the time.

And this has been a fun journey. I can't believe almost 28 minutes has passed. We're trying to keep these marketing smarts lives to about 30 minutes. You can get in, get out, get the curated content, the information, hopefully the fun and enjoyment of the show and the guests that we have on.

Hey, make sure you check out the link below for the full podcast with Purna Virji. It is absolutely amazing. These were just a couple little clips out of it.

If you got value out of today's live show, hit that like and share it with a friend.

That's really what we'd like you to do to keep learning more. Make sure you hit that subscribe button. Watch additional videos here on the MarketingProfs channel. Or again, go check out the original podcast episode.

You know what I want you to do? I want you to go listen, go for a walk. Go on a plane. I don't know. Eat 'em on a box. Eat 'em with a fox. Actually, you're not eating anything, but listen on a box or with a fox. I'm just gonna be done here…

Anyway, keep learning more, and as always remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human. And we'll see you in the next, that's right, the next. This is the first of many Marketing Smarts Live. Next week, same bat time, same bat channel. Enjoy the rest of your day.